Tag Archives: open air market

PART ONE OF AN IRRELEVANT AND SCATTERED PERSONAL ESSAY ABOUT MY VARIOUS RELATIONSHIPS WITH FOOD

I didn’t eat a lot in college. I don’t know why, exactly. Granted there’s something to be said for the quality of the offerings–our dining hall was named Englar, we called the food Glarbage, we spent a lot of time talking about how the people who ran the cafeteria provided similar services for jails / prisons–I think I just wasn’t interested in eating. Like, why bother with food when I could be, I don’t know, reading a book! writing a paper! talking a lot in class! drinking crappy beer in the same crappy apartment week after week! reading more books! repressing anxiety! frenetically lifting weights!

It’s not that I couldn’t have eaten food if I had really wanted to. Other people ate food. Nobody was hiding it from me. It wasn’t a hard thing to do. You just went out and got some. But I was so introverted, clearly repressing a lot of anxiety, not to mention a late bloomer in high school to boot, that I guess I just never realized it.

When I finally became intestinally active, my relationships with food were wild, passionate affairs. I couldn’t control myself. I’d buy big bottles of fancy lemonade and down them before I even made it to the parking lot. I could barely walk through the aisles without having some kind of gastronomic fantasy. I would see a juicy peach and, in my imagination, I would take it home and make a delicious pickled chutney. Those artichokes? I would slow roast them with fennel and white balsamic and eat out their hearts.

In reality, I simply wasted time and money and made a lot of mistakes. That peach? It sat in the basket and withered in the heat. Those artichokes? Molded. The trash. One time I even took home a can of sardines thinking I would eat it with saltines or something. They’re still in the cabinet. I don’t know what I was thinking.

And the fact remained that, though the meals I had were satisfying in themselves, I was ultimately, always, inevitably wanting more. The fuller I found myself, the emptier I became. Everything turned to shit. And so I finally decided that I would just stop eating.

And it is on this relatively down note that we continue our tradition of bringing the best fresh, local, organic contemporary literature to the Downtown Phoenix Public Market to begin our second season of